A variety of different types of mowing and trimming devices have been devised for meeting the requirements of particular applications. Conventional lawn maintenance, however, has required a lawn mower to cut the lawn and a lawn trimmer to trim the edges of the lawn, including areas of vegetation that border fences, buildings, etc. Flexible line vegetation trimmers are commonly used today for such trimming operations. Although the equipment for this two-part procedure is readily available, the procedure inherently involves a substantial duplication of effort since an operator must guide both types of equipment over substantially the same area, e.g., adjacent to buildings and other structures.
In response, various devices that combine mowing and trimming features in one machine have been developed. For example, such an apparatus is disclosed by Watrous in U.S. Pat. No. 2,669,826, wherein a two-wheel lawn mower is presented having a forwardly mounted cutting head that is supported on a ground engaging shoe. In Watrous the axle and housing are pivotally connected, thereby permitting the entire cutting head to swing from side to side with respect to the rear wheels and handle. This approach, however, disadvantageously leaves the handle in a position close to the structure around which vegetation trimming is to occur.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,077,191 to Pittinger, a filament trimmer/mower is disclosed that includes a four wheel support frame. Each of the front and rear wheel-and-axle assemblies are pivotally mounted with respect to the frame. Pittinger, however, suffers from the disadvantage that the rotating head is held in a fixed position in the center of the frame between the wheels. Therefore, it is difficult to trim the vegetation growing alongside a building or other structure since the filament line would not normally extend outside the path of travel of the wheels.
Although there are numerous additional known devices in the art of combined mowing and trimming apparatus, there remains room in the art for further improvements to the known devices.